By Eric Blauer
In the book of Hosea God talks about how he wins back a wayward people. He uses marriage language, the words of covenant, vulnerability, loaded and emotional language through out the book. It’s volatile and reveals a whole palate of colors that any married couple would recognize to various degrees.
Scripture is clear that love is a life shaking, shaping, framing reality that can open graves and lay waste the cosmos in recreative power. Love is a fire, but in saying that, it just sounds so tame. We should handle love with holy fear and wonder. It’s combustible and celestial in it’s resurrecting power. Love awakened the grave and will remake the cosmos in the end. The scripture says God is love, which should cause us to stand back at the burning bush, remove our shoes and tread with sacred wonder.
Song of Songs 8:6-7
Set me as a seal over your heart;
wear me as an emblem on your arm
For love is as strong as death,
and jealousy is as relentless as the grave.
Love flares up like a blazing fire, a very ardent(vehement) flame.
No amount of water can quench love;
a raging flood cannot drown it out.
If a person tried to exchange all of his wealth for love,
then he would be surely rejected.
There’s a couple places in the dialogue of Hosea that one could lift out and turn into prayer for one another. There will be moments or seasons in marriage where one another’s hearts can get dangerously wayward.
It’s natural to go through tides in a relationship. There are those incoming waves of sensual and erotic times, when love rushes in like a thundering, racing wave, consuming and overwhelming us in passion, persistence and all the glories of ecstasy. It’s the hunger of incoming tides that pulsate with all the energy of attraction that then leads to the more mature depths of attachment.
The middle tides are where we spend most of our love life, it’s where attachment and bonding solidify a relationship. Here’s where love gently rolls and churns in a soothing calm. It’s a place of sustaining goodness, expansive and alive but not loud and chaotic as the shallows.
But there are other seasons when it’s dry ground far out into the sea’s edge of our togetherness. It’s in these times that the dangers of waywardness can accumulate from thoughts, to intents, to actions and for many that often leads to betrayals and for some in time, divorce.
We need the practice of prayer in our marriages, a wind of God’s hovering of creative and nurturing presence, his words and ours, mixed together over our private Edens. Prayer is essential to being sensitive to God’s voice, his words and ways and how that interacts with our marriages. When we pray God’s word, we agree and declare his will on earth as it is in heaven. We orient ourselves in the clarity of His heart and mind over situations. Praying scripture gives us kindling and fire when we may not know how or what to say.
Below are two passages out of Hosea from which you can pull the words your heart and mind resonate the most with as you think about your marriage. Read them silently first. Sit in the passage with a listening heart. What words stand out? What thoughts come to your mind? What feelings are provoked? Now pray the passage, slowly, purposefully, speaking each set of words with a holy sense of importance and power. Let the word of God come out of your mouth with the understanding that his word spoke the universe into existence. Nothing is to difficult for God, what he speaks, comes to pass and accomplishes whatever he determines it to do. We are not practicing magic or incantations, there is not secret knowledge here, it’s just faithful agreement with what God has said in his word.
“But I will fence her in with thorn bushes. I will block the road to make her lose her way. When she runs after her lovers, she won’t be able to catch up with them. She will search for them but not find them. Then she will think “I might as well return to my husband because I was better off with him than I am now.” (Hosea 2:6–7)
“I’m going to marry you, and this time it’ll be forever in righteousness and justice. Our covenant will reflect a loyal love and great mercy; our marriage will be honest and truthful, and you’ll understand who I really am—the Eternal One. (Hosea 2:19-20)
These passages remind us of the ongoing recommitment of marriage and the dangers of waywardness. I pray that as you pray and contemplate the meaning of these words, you will find a fresh strength returning. That your will hear the incoming waves of love and the tides will boil and churn again. That you will be brought back together in life animating passion and tenderness and once again your marriage will be full of life and love.
Pastor Eric, do you think marriage is in the cards for everyone?
No at all. That’s the beauty of the New Testament, it liberates fulfillment from the OT view of it being primarily connected to marriage, kids and sex.